data for U.S. counties from 2005 to 2012, we test whether higher levels of economic diversity mediated the effects of the Great Recession via four measures of stability. Spatial spillover effects are modeled by the use of the spatial Durbin estimator with heteroscedastic errors. The data generally support the central hypothesis that higher levels of diversity within a county are associated with enhanced employment stability across all counties as well as subsets of metro and nonmetro counties. Results for wage stability, however, appear to contradict our other findings. We suggest that underlying labor elasticities can bridge these apparent contradictory results. (JEL R11, R12, O47)
Regional economic resilience can be defined as an economy’s ability to withstand and recover quickly from shocks. The ability to measure resilience is necessary to developing our understanding of what influences resilience. In this paper, we develop a new, two‐dimensional quantitative measure of resilience using observed differences between expected and actual employment in a region following a shock and distinguish the response to the shock from random variation. We demonstrate one application of this metric to US county‐level employment data to compare county responses to the 2007–2009 national recession and discuss how different regions of the United States responded to the shock of the Great Recession in terms of resilience.
Using US county-level data, we explore how economic diversity influenced economic stability over the period of the Great Recession. We find that higher diversity is associated with greater stability, but there are distinct spatial patterns and the relationship does not hold for much of the central part of the US.
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